Jake Nickell
Threadless
Chicago, IL USA
"I've been lucky-I've done pretty well-but even if I'd been doing this for the past 14 years and making just enough to get by, I'd still consider it a success."
Career Roadmap
Jake's work combines: Design, Entrepreneurship, and Being Creative
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Day In The Life
Skills &
Education
Advice for getting started
Always have a personal project on the side that you are working on. It keeps you distracted, but also might lead to something incredible and unexpected.
Here's the path I took:
High School
Bachelor's Degree
Web Page, Digital/Multimedia and Information Resources Design
The Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago
Life & Career Milestones
My path in life took a while to figure out
1.
Taught himself how to build websites when he was 14, but kind of "burnt out" on that after he got stuck making basic sites for local businesses.
2.
Was into art and math/computer science, and he had choose between the two when he was picking a college.
3.
Decided to choose art school but worked as a web developer on the side.
4.
Entered a t-shirt design into a competition and won; realized how amazing that felt and started Threadless that day.
5.
Had been spending most of his free time browsing a global art forum online; offered to start printing artists' work on t-shirts.
6.
People were interested, but Jake didn't even really know what he was doing; had to call screenprinters, figure out how to make his offer work.
7.
Wasn't financially successful for the first two years because he put every dime back into printing more shirts, but that paid off in the long haul.
8.
Loves that Threadless fosters a community where artists can show pride in their work, know that 5,000 people all over the world are wearing their prints.
Defining Moments
How I responded to discouragement
THE NOISE
Messages from Society in general:
You are just a scam.
How I responded:
We ran our business so poorly to begin with that everyone from credit card companies to FedEx thought we had to be a scam. Admittedly, we made huge mistakes early on to warrant this because we genuinely didn't know what we were doing. It's all been a learning process. Learning from those early mistakes has made us stronger.
Experiences and challenges that shaped me
We experienced a period of explosive growth really early on in the development of the company that we weren't prepared for. It all happened organically which is great, but at the time it was scary because we didn't know how to keep up with ourselves.
We were running on a shoestring budget to start out with which made keeping up with our high demand difficult. We ran into a few problems with debt racking up because we weren't following proper procedures.